Even if it could be proven that Christine Blasey Ford deliberately slandered Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — and I am not saying that’s the case — that act of willful character assassination wouldn’t the worst thing about this horrid chapter in American life.
Donald Trump has received an enormous amount of criticism for the damage he’s done to constitutional and democratic norms. I have been among those critics at times. But few of his transgressions can hold a candle to the mob assault on many of those norms in recent days.
Over and over, elected officials and leading commentators alike have insisted Ford’s allegation that Kavanaugh attempted to drunkenly rape her must be true because other men have done such things. “But really,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), “guess who is perpetuating all of these kinds of actions? It’s the men in this country. And I just want to say to the men in this country: Just shut up and step up, do the right thing for a change.”
Substitute “blacks” for “men” and this demagoguery is instantly recognizable as bigotry.
One of the greatest revolutionary ideas in all of human history is the classically liberal notion that there is no such thing as group rights. For thousands of years, aristocrats had more rights than peasants. When America was founded, whites had more rights than blacks, men had more rights than women, and rich white men had more rights than everybody else. This wasn’t always true on paper, but it was overwhelmingly true in the real world.
America has worked — as a matter of law, politics and moral education — to live up to our ideals of individual rights, and we’ve made enormous progress. These last few days have not only proved how much more work is left to be done, but how…
